It looks like the biggest April Fool’s Joke was on all of us. Despite persistent rumors that Google was in talks to acquire Twitter (the coolest thing since the last coolest thing since sliced bread), no deal is forthcoming.
Last night I met Dan Pritchett, technical fellow at eBay. He told me that eBay alone has 21 identity systems.
So, if you wanted to use every part of eBay’s empire, like Skype, PayPal, StumbleUpon, etc, you’d need to sign in 21 different times.
Needless to say he, and others at eBay, are working on solving that problem.
Why did I meet up with Dan Pritchett? Because of a speech by Tim Berners Lee, the guy who invented the Web. No, Al Gore didn’t do that. Heh.
Some announcements are surprising, while others are expected.
This is neither; although we didn’t know it was going to happen, it’s actually quite logical that the Google Talk Gadget would gain support for 19 more languages.
Matt Cutts recently offered a public voting for my lynching, but we just talked things over, and there will be no lynching - at least not yet. I think Matt is a great guy, but his job is tough as a public face of THE company dominating the web.
It looks like the Windows Live Search Club, the puzzle game promotion that seemed so successful for Microsoft at first, is quickly turning into a PR disaster for the company.
The Club, which had searchers play puzzle games in order to win prizes, originally gave Microsoft a huge boost in search engine market share, a gain which has slowly dissapeared entirely in the last few months. Even worse, though, is the anger the Club’s fans are now turning towards the company.